Social Movement Activists Research Articles

Converging forces: social movements and the origins of permanent education policy in francophone Belgium

ABSTRACT This article looks at how social movements in francophone Belgium shaped the institutional contours of adult education ‘from below’. It focuses on the integral role played by progressive social movements in the creation of a regional state-based system of adult education in 1976, known as the Service de l’Éducation Permanente (SdEP). Blending historical and sociological methods, it is shown that the SdEP emerged when a movement-based legacy of popular education initially forged as an extension of the labour movement in the francophone community during the late nineteenth century converged with new sets of movement-based actors and ideas emanating from a contentious wave of youth- and student-led protest around 1968. Additional insight is also given into a series of political processes that empowered the efforts of social movement actors working in the field of adult education: regionalisation and Europeanisation.

A South African Perspective on Learning in Social Movement Activism

There is a body of education scholarship in South Africa that captures the role played by social movements in democratising education in post-apartheid South Africa. However, this scholarship says little about how power dynamics affect learning and intellectual labour in social movements or social movement organisations. In addition, the issue of learning in social movements or social movement organisations is hardly explored in the South African social movement literature. This lack of focus on how activists, especially grassroots activists in working-class communities, learn and produce knowledge in social movements and organisations obscures the complexity of learning and knowledge production in activist settings. This article explores how activists, especially grassroots activists, learn in social movements. Based on secondary literature and interviews, the article advances two main arguments: First, learning in social movements and organisations takes place in non-formal and informal ways. Both these forms of learning take place inside and outside formal educational settings. And they both contribute to the empowerment and critical consciousness of activists in social movements and organisations. In addition, informal learning takes place inside and outside popular educational spaces. However, it is not inevitable that non-formal and informal forms of learning in activist settings will generate critical knowledge and activist practices that disrupt the status quo. Second, power relations based on “race”, social class, gender, and sexuality, among other axes of social division, impact on how learning takes place in non-formal or popular contexts of education. This article seeks to understand how power relations shape the learning and knowledge production process in social movements and organisations.

Art for democracy’s sake: How neo-McCarthyism is resisted by arts-based social movements

The rise of neo-McCarthyism has strengthened the power of the state through the repressive use of public institutions. Those who challenge capitalism and authoritarianism are singled out for reprisal. Arts-based social movements can resist state-sponsored neo-McCarthyite sanctions against democracy. Social movement activists can provide counter-narratives to the emerging forms of anti-leftism in autocratic states. As a model of resistance, travelling art and theatre groups could operate on a collaborative, crowdfunded basis, moving from place to place and providing innovative alternatives to the status quo. They would present comedy sketches, monologues, oratory, parodies, poetry, satires and songs that have a social and political message. They would at the same time disseminate information to help people make effective use of available resources and connect with solidarity networks. Performances could be live-streamed or recorded, then uploaded onto various social media platforms, helping to promote social movement objectives. Due to the collaborative nature of the work, public support would grow for these arts troupes that would eventually become self-funded. As social movement projects move online, artists encounter new forms of neo-McCarthyite repression.

„Strajk Kobiet”. Zmiany społeczno-kulturowe jako efekt protestów w Polsce

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the socio-political changes that occurred in Poland in 2016 as a result of the outbreak of the so-called black protests. The protests, which later became known as the All-Poland Women’s Strike, were activated several times in the following years, as a result of subsequent events related to the provisions regulating the right to abortion in Poland. The empirical findings contained in this text result from the analysis of statistical data (CBOS reports), dedicated to the research of political party electorates, which was carried out in 2015, 2017 and 2021. Moreover, the article presents own research conducted in the period from April to July 2021 using the method of analysis of the content published on social media by entities established after 2016. The results of the research confirm that the outbreak and the subsequent periodic activation of protests, supported by the activities of entities promoting the right to abortion, initiated two significant changes in Poland. The first is the clear polarization of political party electorates regarding the right to abortion, and the second is the intensification of the discourse on the very right to abortion, introducing new arguments regarding termination of pregnancy to the agenda (as well as other topics related to the situation of women and broadly understood sex education). Both of the indicated outcomes resulted in the phenomenon of abortion being visible in the public discourse, especially in social media. The following analysis is part of the trend of social research devoted to the importance of socio-political protests in democratic countries and the role of social media as an immanent tool used in the activity of new social movements.

Considering the Symbiotic Relationship Between Religion, Digital Media, and Social Movement Leadership – A Systematic Review Using PRISMA

The study of leadership has been long explicitly debated, specifically in social movements. While the discussion of social movement leadership has increasingly made its presence in digital media studies, it falls short of understanding religious socio-political action and in the nexus of religion. Moreover, the role of religion has continually been confined in the contexts of conflict, terrorism, and extremism. Based on the said argument, this article develops a systematic review of religion, digital media, and social movement leadership. The present paper follows the PRISMA systematic review protocol as a guideline for data collection and reporting. Data of articles were obtained from the Scopus database between 2010 and 2021. Findings indicate that religion is used both as an explanatory component to either rationalise conflict or to empower social movements. Religion plays a significant role in social movements that are mediated through digital media. Relevant studies have increasingly examined religion concerning online practices and in the context of social movements. The paper highlights that religiously embedded social movements can be examined using social movement and digital media perspectives. Nonetheless, it must extend the religious analytical lens to thoroughly comprehend the religious components, particularly when it involves religious social movement actors. Keywords: Religion, digital media, social movement leadership, socio-political, PRISMA.

States vs. Social Movements: Protests and State Repression in Asia

This study considers how governments use state-sponsored propaganda and state violence in tandem to repress social movements and, in so doing, exacerbate polarization. We specifically focus on cases in young and non-democracies in East and Southeast Asia: China and Hong Kong, the Free Papua Movement in Indonesia, and Myanmar’s more recent coup. Using a time series analysis, our analysis reveals a temporal relationship between state propaganda and violence; however, we do not find much evidence that these state actions Granger-cause social movement activities. The exception to this is in Myanmar, where we find that repressive state actions decrease activity in Facebook groups criticizing the Tatmadaw, which in turn increases offline protest activities.

Exploring social movement concepts and actions in a knowledge uptake and sustainability context: A concept analysis

ObjectivesTo share a concept analysis of social movement aimed at advancing its application to evidence uptake and sustainability in health-care. MethodsWe applied Walker and Avant method to clarify the concept of social movement in the context of knowledge uptake and sustainability. Peer-reviewed and grey literature databases were systematically searched for relevant reports that described how social movement action led to evidence-based practice changes in health and community settings. Titles, abstracts and full texts were reviewed independently and in duplicate, resulting in 38 included articles. ResultsSocial movement action for knowledge uptake and sustainability can be defined as individuals, groups, or organizations that, as voluntary and intrinsically motivated change agents, mobilize around a common cause to improve outcomes through knowledge uptake and sustainability. The 10 defining attributes, three antecedents and three consequences that we identified are dynamic and interrelated, often mutually reinforcing each other to fortify various aspects of the social movement. Examples of defining attributes include an urgent need for action, collective action and collective identity. The concept analysis resulted in the development of the Social Movement Action Framework. ConclusionsSocial movement action can provide a lens through which we view implementation science. Collective action and collective identity – concepts less frequently canvassed in implementation science literature – can lend insight into grassroots approaches to uptake and sustainability. Findings can also inform providers and change leaders on the practicalities of harnessing social movement action for real-world change initiatives. By mobilizing individuals, groups, or organizations through social movement approaches, they can engage as powered change agents and teams that impact the individual, organizational and health systems levels to facilitate knowledge uptake and sustainability.

Who Are We? Square Politics and the Collective Self-Understanding of the Indignados in Spain and Greece—Reflections and Legacies

ABSTRACT As occupations of squares in Spain spread across Europe, the Spanish Indignados gave rise to a transnational movement of ordinary citizens united in their anger against the banks, corruption, the electoral system, the global financial system, and the press. In this article, we reflect upon the legacies of the Spanish and Greek Indignados and show how their collective self-understanding—that is, a sense of a “us”—is formed and articulated very differently in Spain and Greece through square politics. We argue that it is the dramaturgy of political protest that fundamentally constructs and shapes the collective self-understanding of the Indignados in Spain and Greece. We will see that while in Spain there is a clearer sense of a shared political project and a shared identity, in Greece social movement actors were divided by their particular agendas and sectarian identities, which resulted in different articulations of their collective identity.

The Social Movement Archive

The Social Movement Archive

Ativismo político para a construção de novos mercados alimentares

This article presents a comparative institutional analysis of the peasant movements’ activism for the construction of new food markets in Brazil and Chile. Data were collected between March 2016 and December 2018 through interviews with leaders of these movements, policymakers and direct observation of different marketing initiatives. The results reveal that the Brazilian institutional trajectory opened up more space for the activism of agrarian social movements, such as the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), in the construction of markets that incorporate values ​​associated with the principles of agroecology and food sovereignty. On the other hand, in Chile, this type of activism proved to be less present in the peasant movements’ repertoire of action. In this country, due to the fragmentation of these movements as an effect of the strong repression of the military regime, the main initiatives are associated with specific public policies and, therefore, face problems for scaling up.

Controlling for What? Movements, Measures, and Meanings in the US Gender Wage Gap Debate

Abstract Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the example of the gender wage gap in the United States, this article showcases how stylized facts travel into political debates, and how the choices made in characterizing an aspect of economic life (such as controlling for full-time work, but little else) interact with social movement activism, and folk understandings of economic life. The gender wage gap was first calculated in the 1950s, but did not take on special importance until the 1960s–1970s, when feminists rallied around the statistic as a useful aggregate measure of women's economic disempowerment. Academics soon followed, and sociologists and economists began to publish studies documenting trends in the gap and trying to account for its sources. The comparable worth movement of the 1980s explicitly argued that the wage gap resulted from occupational segregation and the devaluation of women's work. As that movement faltered in the late 1980s, the gender wage gap became increasingly understood through the lens of women's choices and trade-offs between work and family, and occupational segregation dropped out of the narrative. Throughout this period, the gap was frequently misunderstood or misrepresented as reflecting the narrow sort of same-job, different-pay discrimination made illegal by the 1963 Equal Pay Act, adding confusion to the public debate over women's economic position. These dynamics showcase how technical choices made in the identification of stylized facts, such as statistical controls, are simultaneously deeply political choices.

All In This Together: Antecedents and Consequences of Allyship in Organizations

Complementing recent theoretical developments in the realm of allyship, our symposium offers four presentations that provide empirical tests of the antecedents (Presentations 1 & 2) and consequences (Presentations 3 & 4) of allyship in organizations. Specifically, presenters will discuss the role of cognitive and affective motivators for allyship, and the impact of allies’ involvement on people’s perceptions of and attitudes toward allies. Furthermore, our symposium refines the scope and boundaries of allyship research through the incorporation of diverse research perspectives: examining allyship from those who also identity as disadvantaged (e.g., Asians for Black Lives Matter), exploring non-linear effects of motivators, studying liberal (e.g., gender equality) and conservative (e.g., anti-affirmative action) movements, and conducting experiments with social movement activists. In a world where both individuals and organizations strive to promote effective allyship, our hope is that this collective work will illuminate both the antecedents and consequences of allyship. The Strategy of Social Change: Explaining Support for Black Lives Matter across Racial Groups Presenter: Preeti Vani; Stanford Graduate School of Business Presenter: Shilaan Alzahawi; Stanford Graduate School of Business Presenter: Jennifer Dannals; Yale School of Management Presenter: Nir Halevy; Stanford U. Evidence for a Curvilinear Effect of Psychological Discomfort on Dominant Group Members’ Engagement Presenter: Olivia Foster-Gimbel; New York U. Presenter: L Taylor Phillips; NYU Stern Perceptions of White Allies’ (Ulterior) Motives in a Racially Diverse Conservative Coalition Presenter: Michelle Lee; New York U. Presenter: Maureen Craig; New York U. Beneficiary Activists' Attitudes toward Male Allies in the Feminist Movement Presenter: Jun Won Park; Princeton U. Presenter: Preeti Vani; Stanford Graduate School of Business Presenter: Sidney Saint-Hilaire; Yale U. Presenter: Michael W. Kraus; Yale School of Management

Book Review - Francesco Della Puppa & Giuliana Sanò (eds.), Stuck and Exploited. Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Italy Between Exclusion, Discrimination and Struggles; Venezia: Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2021, 362 pp.

At a time when the guarantees that international protection seemed to offer are being constantly undermined across the Global North, Stuck and Exploited offers a comprehensive approach to the current processes of retrenchment of reception rights and the dismantlement of reception structures through an in-depth analysis of the Italian case. With a strong ethnographic lens, Della Puppa and Sanò’s edited volume compiles 16 contributions of academics, activists, and practitioners working in the field of asylum to examine the processes of exclusion and discrimination of asylum seekers in their passage through an asylum reception system marked by arbitrariness, neglect, and opacity. Divided into two parts, the first part of the volume examines the national developments and characteristics of the Italian asylum reception system in its insertion within wider tendencies of migration governance through reception in the Global North. However, it does not fail to deepen in the particularities of different Italian regions and municipalities, highlighting how the implementation of national and EU policy is interpreted and reinterpreted at the local level and how, within this context, the discretion of “street-level bureaucrats,” as described by Lipsky, and other intermediaries, as well as the actions of social movements or the civil society can become a tool for “debordering” or yet another strategy of further control over migrants’ lives.

How Climate Movement Actors and News Media Frame Climate Change and Strike: Evidence from Analyzing Twitter and News Media Discourse from 2018 to 2021

Twitter enables an online public sphere for social movement actors, news organizations, and others to frame climate change and the climate movement. In this paper, we analyze five million English tweets posted from 2018 to 2021 demonstrating how peaks in Twitter activity relate to key events and how the framing of the climate strike discourse has evolved over the past three years. We also collected over 30,000 news articles from major news sources in English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom) to demonstrate how climate movement actors and media differ in their framing of this issue, attention to policy solutions, attribution of blame, and efforts to mobilize citizens to act on this issue. News outlets tend to report on global politicians’ (in)action toward climate policy, the consequences of climate change, and industry's response to the climate crisis. Differently, climate movement actors on Twitter advocate for political actions and policy changes as well as addressing the social justice issues surrounding climate change. We also revealed that conversations around the climate movement on Twitter are highly politicized, with a substantial number of tweets targeting politicians, partisans, and country actors. These findings contribute to our understanding of how people use social media to frame political issues and collective action, in comparison to the traditional mainstream news outlets.

Increasing Participation of Non-State Actors in ASEAN: Problems and Options

This article aims to assess ASEAN's commitment to enhancing the role of non-state actors that has emerged since the late 1990s. There is a tendency that grassroots social movement activists do not seem to have an official forum in ASEAN. Although some non-state actors have gained access to ASEAN, this privilege is largely granted to business interest groups and elite think-tanks. This research applied qualitative method by using the concept of historical institutionalization, this paper seeks to explain the characteristics of an institution using events that occurred in the past during the process of creating and consolidating institutions. The concept is also responsive to explaining ---and, in some cases, even prescribing--- changes. The study found that the increased participation of non-state actors will increase ASEAN's legitimacy in carrying out its growing role in the region. This article contributes to offer some options that ASEAN must cultivate to improve participation of non-state actors. Keywords: ASEAN, historical institutionalism, non-state actors, participatory regionalism

Can Human Rights Help Social Movement Activists Frame Inequality as an Injustice? Lessons From Mining Affected Communities in South Africa

Can Human Rights Help Social Movement Activists Frame Inequality as an Injustice? Lessons From Mining Affected Communities in South Africa

New Contentious Politics. Civil Society, Social Movements, and the Polarisation of German Politics

ABSTRACT In this Special Issue, we show that the study of civil society, social movements, and protest is central for assessing the current state of German politics. First, moving beyond political parties and electoral politics delivers crucial insights into the ideological, affective, and organisational structuring of emerging polarisation and cleavages. Second, the transformations in electoral politics are closely interrelated with dynamics in civil society. Building on these perspectives, the contributions to the Special Issue underline that, due to the emergence of new cleavages, Germany, like other European countries, has seen a double transformation of its landscape of political contestation: ‘New contentious politics’ is on the rise, marked by new issues and claims as well as hybrid organisational forms and close interactions between protest and electoral politics. Importantly, in contrast to long-held assumptions, protest is not the exclusive terrain of ‘progressive’ forces and not shaped by increasingly differentiated arenas of mobilisation. Based on a broad range of cases and methods, the contributions take stock of social movement and civil society activism in Germany since the 2000s, i.e. in an era of multiple crises and increasing polarisation.

Race, power, and policy: understanding state anti-eviction policies during COVID-19

AbstractIn the United States, striking racial disparities in COVID-19 infection and mortality rates were one of the core patterns of the virus. These racial disproportionalities were a result of structural factors—laws, rules, and practices embedded in economic, social, and political systems. Public policy is central among such structural features. Policies distribute advantages, disadvantages, benefits, and burdens in ways that generate, reinforce, or redress racial inequities. Crucially, public policy is a function of power relations, so understanding policy decisions requires attentiveness to power. This paper asseses statistical associations between racial power and state anti-eviction policies. Charting the timing of state policy responses between March 2020 and June 2021, I examine correlations between response times and racial power as reflected in state populations, voting constituencies, legislatures, and social movement activities. Ultimately, I do not find any significant associations. The null results underscore the complexities and difficulties of studying race, power, and public policy with theoretical nuance and empirical care. While the findings leave us with much to learn about how racial power operates, the conceptualization and theorizing offered in the paper, instructively underscore the value of centering racial power in analyses of public policy.

Feminist Approaches to Gender Equity in Perú: The Roles of Conflict, Militancy, and Pluralism in Feminist Activism

For the past several decades, coordinated efforts from within the women’s social movement in Perú have led to groundbreaking legislation surrounding gender equity – for example, the National Gender Equality Policy of 2019 and the Gender Parity Law of 2020. These institutionalized policy changes mark milestones on the path to gender equity, certainly in Perú, but activist efforts that targeted these outcomes can inform women globally. The current study investigated key components of feminist activism by social movement actors themselves through the use of testimonio with nine key leaders in the movement. Using a liberation psychology approach and thematic narrative analysis, the findings suggested three key components of feminist activism: conflict, militant identity, and pluralism that were critical in processes of change. Centering majority world women’s voices contributes to the production of knowledge regarding approaches to gender equity, in particular because much that has been written about feminist action in psychology has been produced among samples of white women in the United States. Implications for understanding how the findings have the potential for global change are discussed.

The digital repression of social movements, protest, and activism: A synthetic review.

Repression research examines the causes and consequences of actions or policies that are meant to, or actually do, raise the costs of activism, protest, and/or social movement activity. The rise of digital and social media has brought substantial increases in attention to the repression of digital activists and movements and/or to the use of digital tools in repression, which is spread across many disciplines and areas of study. We organize and review this growing welter of research under the concept of digital repression by expanding a typology that distinguishes actions based on actor type, whether actions are overt or covert, and whether behaviors are shaped by coercion or channeling. This delineation between broadly different forms of digital repression allows researchers to develop expectations about digital repression, better understand what is "new" about digital repression in terms of explanatory factors, and better understand the consequences of digital repression.